‘The Diplomat’ Creator Debora Cahn Breaks Down Season 2’s Prescient Plot & That Insane Cliffhanger: “It Looks Like We’re Stealing From The Headlines”
SPOILER ALERT! This post contains major plot details from Season 2 of Netflix’s The Diplomat.
Foreign tensions escalate even further in Season 2 of The Diplomat as Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) continues investigating the bombing of a British aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf.
More from Deadline
The breakneck six-episode season picks up right where things left off in Season 1, plunging viewers into the panic that broke out after a car bomb exploded in the heart of London, killing Parliament member Merritt Grove and leaving Kate’s husband Hal (Rufus Sewell) as well as her deputy chief of mission Stuart Hayford (Ato Essandoh) severely injured.
Kate and British Foreign Secretary Austin Dennison (David Gyasi) had begun to suspect that Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear) was behind both attacks, the first in an effort to quell Scotland’s independence movement and the second to silence Grove. However, as they dig deeper, it turns out to be much more complicated than they ever could have imagined.
It turns out that Trowbridge’s former consultant Margaret Roylin (Celia Imrie) was behind the directive for both bombings…at the direction of U.S. Vice President Grace Penn (Allison Janney). Trowbridge didn’t know, and neither did the President of the United States. Talk about a plot twist!
To make matters even worse, the season ends on a massive cliffhanger, after Hal takes it upon himself to inform the president of VP Penn’s discretion. The shock is so great, it kills him, leaving Penn as the new Commander in Chief.
Lucky for audiences, the series has already been renewed for Season 3.
Creator Debora Cahn broke down the season with Deadline in the interview below. She also discussed Season 2 more broadly in an earlier Q&A with Deadline, which also features a conversation between the stars of the Netflix series and Irish Ambassador Geraldine Byrne Nason that took place ahead of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in April.
DEADLINE: You picked up Season 2 right where things left off in Season 1. Is that the plan going forward, for the rest of the series?
DEBORA CAHN: I like to stay open to the idea that, who knows, at some point we skip ahead a year or two, but I find myself always wanting to come into the story just 30 seconds after we left it. I’ve never done that kind of storytelling before, and I think some of it is a desire to be attentive to the fact that people watch over a longer period of time. They’re watching two, three episodes in a sitting, and we want to feel like it remains propulsive. It’s like one long story. They’re watching one long movie. But once you get in the habit of doing that, then it’s just fun to write that way.
DEADLINE: This season’s story feels incredibly prescient, given it was written quite a while ago. Not only do you have a female VP who is kind of having to do more of the bidding for an older president whose capabilities are being called into question, you then end on this massive cliffhanger with her becoming the president. How does it feel now, to be releasing this less than one week before the presidential election?
CAHN: It’s a little bit terrifying, because we didn’t want to really be doing a ‘rip from the headlines’ thing. The idea is always to find a way into the headspace of the country and the audience, and what are we all thinking about right now, in particular the world of foreign policy. What are our ideas that we’re grappling with as a country, that we can then have these characters grappling with? But we don’t want it to be actually the same minute-by-minute story. I guess we skated a little bit close to the wind — I think I’m mixing my metaphors there — and wound up coming a lot closer to what was happening. We had already filmed it in our world. It was already done right down to, there’s a moment where Kate comes down in a light blue suit, and Kamala Harris wore the identical suit in this big rally. It looks like we’re stealing from the headlines, but…
DEADLINE: So, next week, if we elect our first female president, how are you going to reflect on this season?
CAHN: In some ways, it was really exciting. I’m writing wish fulfillment, and it’s nice that the wish might actually get fulfilled in real life as well. She’s a great character, and she’s such a great actor, we want to create a situation that is as rich and goopy as possible for that character. But, yeah, it’s intimidating to be talking about something that is playing out. We don’t want to paint ourselves into a corner that makes us look obsolete and sad.
DEADLINE: I think this season brings up a lot of questions about how we view the competency of our leaders, especially women. Once we know Grace Penn instructed Roylin, we think she’s unfit, but then she explains herself, and the situation becomes far more complicated. Is she right? Does it even really matter if we fully agree with her? How did you reflect on all of that as you wrote it?
CAHN: The idea from the very beginning was to create a situation where something bad happens, and we know who did it, our enemy did it, and we accuse that enemy, and then it becomes clear that they actually were not involved. And then we know that it, ‘Oh, it’s the other enemy.’ And then we learn that that’s not really true either. Then we learn that it was our friend, and then we learned that it was us. So ultimately, what I’m looking to do is take a situation that feels like a global conflict and a horrific crime and a tragedy and see how something like that unfolds. For me, it’s much more interesting and challenging to see how good people, who I think are really smart, can end up making a decision that has terrible, horrible consequences.
I think that a lot of times, we give ourselves an out when we look at something that’s happened in the world and we say, ‘Well, that’s because the bad people did it.’ The bad people in our country, or the bad people in another country. It’s not an accident that it’s Allison. She is so lovable and admirable. So to take a character like that and allow her to walk us through every step of this decision that we find deplorable and that we call evil, and then come to a place of, ‘Wow, this is really complicated, and it’s really hard to get it right…’ There was not a good option on the table. The situation is bad, the decision maker is not.
DEADLINE: So, what does this mean for Kate’s VP ambitions? Are they dead in the water?
CAHN: Welcome to Season 3.
DEADLINE: I found it so interesting that Kate gets confronted with the idea that her attraction to Hal is connected to his tendency to make spontaneous, often irresponsible decisions. How is that going to impact them?
CAHN: We’re drawn to charismatic people. We’re drawn to thinking outside the box. We’re drawn to’ big, magic moments and grand gestures. Then the question is, what are the consequences of those? The consequences are often disastrous. So when you’ve experienced both sides of that rollercoaster ride, do you walk away and say, ‘I’m not looking for that anymore’? Or do you do what I think a lot of people do, and I certainly did for much of my life, which is, ‘Well, now I’m looking for that — the peak, the high, amazing moments, without the downside, and I’m sure that it exists’? Sadly, in my research, it does not. So Kate’s kind of struggling with that herself, and reaching the point where she realizes that the magic side of Hal and the disaster side of Hal are all the same, and that if you get one, you have to have the other. That’s something that she’s trying to learn, and she rationally learns, but emotionally never does.
DEADLINE: So, is his culpability in the death of the president and Grace Penn’s ascension her last straw?
CAHN: These are Season 3 spoilers! Can union endure under those circumstances? I don’t know.
DEADLINE: I also want to talk about Dennison. He is kind of forced out of the cut and dry morals he operates under in Season 1 as this situation becomes more complicated. How is he going to navigate these new developments?
CAHN: I think Dennison is still managing to live inf a bipolar universe of right and wrong, in a way that I think Kate wishes Hal would, and she wishes she herself would. The solutions that he finds to problems are pretty dramatic. He’s willing to be loyal up until a point, and then when he’s not loyal, he’s really not loyal. I think it’s difficult for him to work at all in half measures. I think he needs to either take a stand and defend a position or abandon it and take a different stand and defend that position, which in many ways makes him admirable, and in many ways, makes him not as strong a player on this game board as he wants to be.
DEADLINE: Is there a path forward for his and Kate’s alliance? At the end of the season, he really does not trust her anymore.
CAHN: The Kate-Dennison relationship plays a lot of roles narratively…these are two diplomats. They come from different places. They are dealing with different agendas they’re getting from the government at home, but they are like minded individuals. They see the world very much in a similar way. They have similar goals. They like each other, they get along, they get stuff done. The idealism of the show is that if you can create those kinds of relationships around the world, in clutch moments, it can really help. It can really stop things from going off the rails. So the hope is that the experiences that they’ve had together don’t destroy that.
It’s a sort of a fragile and wonderful and powerful thing. I think it’s something that people go through a lot who are in this kind of work. We can share thinking with our friends, but at the end of the day, if we’re representing a country, the country is going to make a decision and we’re going to carry it out. So how do you come back from that? How do you trust people after that’s been done? I don’t know. I don’t know if you can rebuild after something like that, but it is certainly the question that is facing diplomats time and time again.
Best of Deadline
Sign up for Deadline's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.